The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor

Our Institutions

Driven by want, and prompted by envy

Folklore of the American Celebrity

The Founding Fathers were the first American Celebrities, and their images and personas continue to move units in the commercial and political spheres today. Inseparable from them are institutionalized racism and Manifest Destiny-era ideas of self-righteousness and entitlement, which permeated the roots of American property law and the Constitution.

In 1915, the American Celebrity had changed. Early that year, The Birth of a Nation debuted to soaring reviews and box office records. Arnold would say Americans look to a single event, a sudden birth of a nation. Perhaps, but surely new heroes are born. In 1915, industry was transforming the world, and men like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were public figures of the day. Teddy Roosevelt’s U.S. didn’t want conflict hurting production, and it would take two years after the sinking of the Lusitania for the U.S. to enter the war. Conflict persisted domestically, in large part spurred on by proliferations of new ideologies, but still underpinned with old ones. The film, Birth of a Nation, was a veritable celebration of racism, violence, and supremacism.

Hyper-exploitation

Give us your poor, your tired

Without institutional support, racism is bad for business. Business owners don’t want their train conductors wasting time checking people’s race if they don’t have to. But that doesn’t mean people can or will forget about it. Arnold says new organizations rise to fill the gaps left by an older order. Hyper-exploitation today “happens” to be racist; 40% of Hispanics over 25 do not have a high school diplomas, and the same percentage of prisoners in the U.S. are Black. But that’s a coincidence. New York recently raised $260 million by requiring citizens to purchase new license plates, which were made by prisoners paid $0.42 an hour. The overlap of crime, poverty, education deprivation and lack of job opportunities with race isn’t inevitable. It’s the clear result of actions spurred by words and propelled by ideologies ingrained within the institutions of our country.

The Taney court was and is very much vilified, and probably with good reason. But perhaps Taney the individual is really a victim, merely the personification of an institution charged with jealously guarding a mythological power structure. In Dred Scot, the Taney Court, after pages of exasperatingly explaining how Blacks are historically inferior, rests finally on the authority of the Constitution. Look, it says. Racism is part of our ethos, our creed, our mythology. Its in our courts, its in our laws, its in our constitution of nationhood. And he was right, it was. The deepest underpinnings of American property law stem from racism. No other principle of the law applied quite the same if you were determined to be Black, Hispanic, Native American, Chinese - anything not “white.”

Things long past which come to us only in books

Statesmen today, like priests of the past, search for universal truth

On the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster, the Yes Men appeared on BBC World News, posing as representatives of Dow Chemical. After accepting full responsibility for the disaster, they promised that Dow would invest $12 billion to pay for medical care for those affected, clean up the site, and fund research to look into the hazards of other Dow products and prevent similar accidents. The real Dow Chemical rushed out a press release within hours, denying the statements.

In culture jamming, the basic idea is to shock the unconscious thought process one undergoes while receiving an institutional message, such as authority programming, logos and advertisement, and other branding messages. The Dow Chemical idea works because it forces us to confront our ideas about how institutions could or should function, and how they do. What do we expect from our institutions, and what could we? The WTO piece shows us how far authority can go. Deftly aping officialspeak, the performers slowly push the audience farther and farther, revealing increasingly outlandish perspectives on humanity, until finally, the people cry foul.

Paper

The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor

Driven by want, and prompted by envy

Hyper-exploitation

Things long past which come to us only in books

Quotes:

"The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination... The hyper-exploitation of Black labor was accomplished by treating Black people themselves as objects of property. Race and property were thus conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on race -only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property. Similarly, the conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American life and culture were ratified by conferring and acknowledging the property rights of whites in Native American land. Only white possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged as a basis for property rights." - Cheryl Harris

"Since every history book is a 'conjectural reconstruction of the past' Pirenne concludes that, due to the differences among historians, 'history is a conjectural science, or in other words, a subjective science.' 'How,' asked the English historian Froude, 'can we talk of a science in things long past which come to us only in books?'" - Jerome Frank